Techno utopians

WiReD UK: it’s back!

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There was a surprise in the goodie bag for attendees of WiReD UK’s launch party. Alongside a copy of the launch issue and a Windows game, was a small bottle of Thunderbird – the fortified wine beloved of students and park bench alcoholics.

Actually – I made the last bit up. There was no Thunderbird. But you’ll need something similar – or maybe stronger – to anaesthetise your synapses after trying to read WiReD. After a 12 year absence, the magazine that purports to tell us the future returns to the country that invented the bouncing bomb, the hovercraft, television and the computer.

So, er … is it any good?

I can think of three or four reasons why it should be.

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Anderson downgrades Long Tail to Chocolate Teapot status

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Long Tail

“The end came quickly,” as authors of morbid weepies like to say. On Monday WiReD magazine editor Chris Anderson effectively admitted game over for his “Long Tail”, the idea he’s been dragging so lucratively around the conference circuit for the past four years. In as many words, he downgraded it from “the future of business” to something that’s, er, not very helpful for your business at all.

“I’ll end by conceding a point: It’s hard to make money in the Tail,” Anderson wrote. “The revenues are disproportionately in the Head. Perhaps that will never change.”

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The BBC’s Tragic Twitterers

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Rory Celland Jones

Here’s a conundrum. Top Media People want to come out of the shadows and get “closer to their listeners” – it’s what the Web 2.0 people urge them to do. BBC people in particular are obsessed with being seen to be bossy or “out-of-touch” – especially since three out of four license payers have a gripe with the corporation.

But the more of themselves media people reveal, the more the public sees them as clueless, self-referential and narcissistic bunch so many of them are. And the more time the BBC spends on peripheral New Media wankery, the more people wonder why they’re paying a license fee. You’d need a heart of silicon not to enjoy their agony. The poor souls.

At Monday’s “Radio At The Edge” forum at Westminster a panel of three: presenter Iain Lee, a Nathan Barley-type from Channel 4 called Dan Heft, and the BBC’s website’s tech blogger Rory Cellan Jones – better known as ‘Uncle Bryn’ in the hit comedy show Gavin and Stacey – all came to praise the glory of Twittering, Googling 24×7, and user generated content.

The audience was packed with BBC New Media employees – masters of JavaScript, and people who can say “social media” without blushing. So it all promised to be a swoon – with ritual noises of self-abasement from the broadcasters.

But what spoiled this was the panel’s chair, Fi Glover, who could barely contain her sarcasm or her scorn for the “Emperor’s New Clothes”, as she called it a few times.

Uncle Bryn took to the stage and spent the first minute taking pictures of the other panelists – and the audience – using his Blackberry. Asked what he was doing, he said he was trying to Twitter live that he was Twittering live from a panel about Twitter.

Over to Dan Heft, who reminded us that “you leave a trail of digital content out there”, but Bryn’s own trail had come to a halt – he couldn’t get his Twitter feed to work.

“I haven’t done any work – I’ve been blogging,” Bryn admitted, adding that he’d been “doing a helluva lot of Twittering”, too.

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The Long Tail can seriously damage your business

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The most comprehensive empirical study of digital music sales ever conducted has some bad news for Californian technology utopians. Since 2004, WiReD magazine editor Chris Anderson has been hawking his “Long Tail” proposition around the world: blockbusters will matter less, and businesses will “sell less of more”. The graph has become iconic – a kind of ‘Hockey Stick’ for Web 2.0 – with the author applying his message to many different business sectors. Alas, following the WiReD Way of Business as a matter of faith could be catastrophic for your business and investment decisions.

Long Tail
Anderson bet that the orange portion – the “Tail” – has more value than the red portion – the “Head”. But it doesn’t.

Examining tens of millions of transactions from a large digital music provider, economist Will Page with Mblox founder Andrew Bud and Page’s colleague Gary Eggleton, looked to see how large and valuable the “Tail” of digital music may be. They produced a spreadsheet with 1.5 million rows – so large, in fact, that it required a special upgrade to their Excel software (and more RAM) – and the three revealed their work at the Telco 2.0 conference this week.

They discovered that instead of following a Pareto or “power law” curve, as Anderson suggested, digital song sales follow a classic Log Normal distribution. 80 per cent of the digital inventory sold no copies at all – and the ‘head’ was far more concentrated than the economists expected.

“Is the ‘future of business’ really selling more of less?” asks Page. “Absolutely not. If you had Top of the Pops now, you’d feature the Top 14, not Top 40.”

As Andrew Bud explains:

“The Long Tail’s argument is that the pattern of consumption for media is bent out of shape by the limits of the shops selling them. Digital media lets the nature of people’s demand flow free. Well, we now know what the shape of that demand curve looks like.”

Bud told the conference that the basic shape of consumer demand for digital music clearly fits the Log Normal distribution, “with eye-watering accuracy”. That’s no surprise, he says, because so many sales curves he’s seen over the past ten years follow this distribution.

“Now we’ve seen what happens when tens of millions of choices are thrown in the air and people can go pick them up. What was astounding was the degree of inequality between the head and the tail – by a factor of three. It’s specifically the Log Normal shape that leads to a rather poverty stricken Tail.

“There are Tails where the Tail lives as a kind of welfare state. Not this one. You starve in this Tail.”

Digital sales follow a Log Normal distribution
Brown’s 1956 lognormal curve fits digital sales data much better than “The Long Tail”

This really isn’t the upbeat fairy tale message Anderson has spent four years selling on the conference circuit.

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The Great Circular Awards Ceremony

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Is there a more incestuous and self-congratulatory scene anywhere outside the fashion business? What a strange world it is, the world of “digital rights” activism. Campaigners pause only to pat each other on the back. Last week, anti-copyright campaigners Public Knowledge revealed their annual award winners. The group’s president Gigi B Sohn proudly announced the … Read more

One Laptop Per Child: it’s a con, says former exec

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The former security director of the One Laptop Per Child non-profit has blasted the project for losing sight of its goals, accusing chairman Nicholas Negroponte of deceiving the public. It’s all about shipping kit, says Ivan Krstić in an incendiary essay.

“I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward,” writes Krstić.

“Nicholas’ new OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on their home turf, and by using the one strategy we know doesn’t work.”

Ouch.

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Futurist’s music widget goes titsup 2.0

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Music’s best-known “futurist” has admitted his latest business idea has flopped and the service will close. Gerd Leonard of “Music 2.0” fame, who popularised the phrase “music flows like water”, has discovered that on the internet, revenue flows like set cement.

His company Sonific, which allows bloggers to embed a widget that plays music, will suspend its service on May 1. The founder blamed “lack of solid revenue modelling”

(Translation 2.0: no income).

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Teachers: Feel my Truthiness – Jimbo

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Yes, it’s that time of year when children eagerly gather round a kindly old man with a beard. He makes great promises to them, if only they just work hard enough. But they just get a load of obscenities back.

Only it’s not Santa.

Wikipedia’s Maximum Leader and peripatetic salesman Jimmy Wales breezed into London yesterday. This time he’s pitching Jimbo’s Big Bag of Trivia at teachers and lecturers.

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How Web 2.0 concentrates power, and makes Microsoft stronger

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One IT Manager, bemoaning his lot to me, recently compared the rise of Web 2.0 enthusiasts to the problem the Police has with Freemasons. The blog and wiki evangelists within are not as secretive, of course, but they’re equally cult-like: speaking their own language, and using the populist rhetoric of “empowerment” for relentless self-advancement.

He couldn’t care less that employees were “wasting” time on Facebook – that was a “problem” for their line managers to deal with, and not an IT issue. (Why should IT be blamed if staff played with Rubik’s Cubes all day?) He had always encouraged people to try new software, so long as it remained within the firewall. The real problem, he thought, was that the Web 2.0 cult is loyal to what’s perceived to be good for the greater “Hive Mind”, not the organisation.

This resulted in staff with conflicting agendas.

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Google’s founders are less humble (and jetless) than you think

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Casting around for an example of the simple life to use in an Arab-bashing column, veteran columnist and editor Alexander Chancellor alighted on what he must have thought was the perfect foil to the free-spending Saudis.

It appeared right there in front of him, on his PC, nestling between some coloured balls.

Unlike Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, wrote Chancellor on Saturday, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin “don’t have private jets, Rolls-Royces, yachts or any of the other pointless accoutrements of the super-rich”.

“Page and Brin each own nothing more flashy than a modest Toyota Prius, the environmentally virtuous hybrid car,” he explained, adding:

“Like the other princes of Silicon Valley, they don’t show off. They are eager to appear unpretentious and affect to like simple things. Theirs is a world of jeans, sneakers, Starbucks, and girls-next-door.”

Chancellor didn’t mention high school bops, the Everly Brothers or bobbysox, but it was clear he’d fallen asleep by his PC, dreaming of some forgotten 1950s film (or girl).

Then the blue ball bumped into red ball, and reality returned.

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